normblog

Memory and not talking Turkey

No matter how hard you work on it, there remains an element of mystery in every human being. It wasn't just killing, you see - it was killing with a sadism, a cruelty you simply cannot credit.

These are the words of Dorcy Rugamba, a theatre director from Rwanda who has brought his production of Peter Weiss's The Investigation to this country. He tells Jon Henley that putting on a play about the Holocaust for a Rwandan audience makes it easier to get at the universal aspects of the Rwandan genocide. Earlier Rugamba created Rwanda 94, a documentary drama about that tragedy.

The memory of the offence - it is an elementary human duty. At the weekend a museum was opened at Bergen-Belsen. Bernd Neumann, Germany's Minister for Culture, spoke of the need for the genocide against European Jewry to 'keep its paramount place within the German memory'.

Two memories, respectively 13 years and 60-odd years later.

But more than 90 years after it happened, Turkey continues to deny the genocide against the Armenians; and, in the same liberal newspaper in which the Jon Henley feature on Dorcy Rugamba appears today, it has been urged upon us that the US Congress has no business registering that this was indeed a genocide.

A continuing scourge

Manfred Nowak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, is about to deliver his final report. You may prefer not to read about some of what he has seen.

Do future generations have rights? 3

These are Matt Kramer's responses to my comments posted here:

Though I agree with the statement in your second - parenthetical - paragraph that there is no wrong here, the absence of a wrong has nothing to do with the fact that the future generations can't now complain. (I thought that you were an adherent of the Interest Theory rather than of the Will Theory of rights.) A permanently comatose person can't complain about anything that is done to him, nor can a quadriplegic who is deaf and mute and blind and mentally retarded; but one cannot validly infer that the comatose person and the quadriplegic have no rights (unless one is an adherent of the Will Theory). In the scenario which you contrive here, the absence of a wrong stems instead from the legitimacy of the aim of limiting the size of the human population. I take that aim to be legitimate, even though the deliberate pursuit of the objective of terminating the existence of the human species would be illegitimate.

The charge of begging the question (in your third paragraph) cuts both ways in this debate. I haven't claimed to be offering a conclusive argument in favour of the proposition that future generations en masse are endowed with rights. I've simply claimed to be showing that every argument against that proposition is either wrong or question-begging. In any event, at this stage of my remarks I wasn't even attempting to argue in favour of the aforementioned proposition at all. I was simply indicating that there are principled differences between acting deliberately in such a way as to avert the future birth(s) of some future individual(s) and acting deliberately in such a way as to avert all future births of all future individuals.

Regarding your argument that some hypothetical subgroup of a future planetary population may never come to exist, let me draw attention again to the fact that I'm speaking about future generations en masse rather than about subgroups of the future generations. That is, I'm talking about the continuation of the human species rather than about the materialization of some subset of the species. It is certainly true that processes which preclude the existence of future generations en masse might not involve the commission of any wrongs. For example, if a large asteroid collides with the earth and extinguishes all life thereon, no wrong will have been committed. My claim has not been that future generations en masse have a right to existence. My claim has been that they have a right that we not act collectively and deliberately in ways that will preclude their existence en masse.

I turn to what you say about duties in your penultimate paragraph. Of course future generations don't have duties, but that's not relevant here. The fact that X holds a right vis-à-vis Y never warrants any conclusions about duties borne by X (whether those duties are owed to Y or to X himself or to anyone else). The absence of any valid inferences about duties borne by X is a perfectly general absence, rather than an absence that obtains only when X does not yet exist. The only valid inference about a duty that can be derived from the fact that X holds a right vis-à-vis Y is that Y owes a duty to X.

In the same paragraph you ask: 'How can they have rights of which they cannot yet be the beneficiaries and of which they may never come to be the beneficiaries?' You're again begging the question by assuming (rather than establishing) that the time at which the future generations en masse benefit from any duties now owed to them is in the future rather than now. I maintain that they benefit from those duties now (through the current protection of their future existence).

In your final paragraph you give examples of relational properties that 'they [future generations] can't be endowed with'. Plainly, countless relational properties can never be applicable to future generations. For example, the property of having been born before 2007 is not a property with which anyone in the future could ever be endowed. Likewise, the property of having been alive when John Kennedy was assassinated is not a property with which anyone in the future could be endowed. This doesn't matter. My point was not that all relational properties are applicable to future generations en masse. Such a claim would be absurd. My point was that countless relational properties are applicable (or potentially applicable) to future generations en masse, and you've provided no grounds for thinking that the property of being owed a duty isn't among those latter properties.

[My response to be posted later...]

What's a Sacre?

I didn't know till yesterday. Then I learned that it's a 'standing advisory council on religious education'. And it seems that it's a place where atheists and humanists can get to have an influence on religious education in schools. No bad thing, I reckon. True, the atheists and humanists only get to do this by coming under the heading of 'other faiths' - a description that is open to dispute. Still, no worries if it leads to this point of view (scroll down) getting a hearing:

Religious education classes have got to appeal to the majority of pupils who don't believe in God.

Runaway

A memory - 'of Del Shannon's "Runaway", me standing out with friends on Spreckley Road, smoking, talking, and inside the McGregors' house the Saturday night party in progress'. Now here. Not 1965, though; 1961.

Hair as political cover

According to Steve Rushin, Rudolph Giuliani has no chance. Baldness is the problem:

Americans haven't voted [a bald guy] into office in 51 years, when Dwight Eisenhower won a second term over Adlai Stevenson - the second consecutive election in which two bald men went head to glorious head. That was 1956, when 20th Century Fox released The King and I, starring Yul Brynner as the King of Siam. It was an annus mirabilis for hairless potentates but also the twilight of their brief golden age - the last time heads of state were not synonymous with heads of hair.

Enjoy.

Expecting the worst - and too much

Today George Monbiot enlists Cormac McCarthy's The Road in pressing upon his readers a vision of impending catastrophe. The trouble, if his diagnosis is correct, is that people won't act as if catastrophe is upon them until it either is upon them or very nearly is - until they start to feel its effects. Monbiot writes ruefully:

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life.

Indeed. For this is what people do. How could they live in the world, most of them, unless they did it? Even before, even without, global warming, the world accommodates so much human anguish, so much suffering, so much in need of urgent attention, that only a saint is able to take it all upon his conscience, and keep it ever-present. We carry on with our lives, doing what we can here or there, some of us less, some of us more, to make things better. Monbiot again:

I sense that... a hardening of interests, a shutting down of concern, is taking place among the people of the rich world. If this is true, we do not need to wait for the forests to burn or food supplies to shrivel before we decide that civilisation is in trouble.

On such a basis, civilization has always been in trouble, since human concern for others stretches only so far, and though sometimes also further than that, it is generally - and properly - stronger for intimate others, on whom most people's quite limited time and energies are concentrated.

This is not either an endorsement of complacency or a plea for indifference; I have myself argued for a morality that would demand more of all of us. It is merely the observation that a politics of meliorative action that deals in imminent catastrophe and an expectation of heroic other-directed concern and other-directed effort is likely to find only a limited audience.

Killing aid workers

Such attacks are a clear violation of international humanitarian law and they must stop.

That's Tom Koenigs, Ban Ki-Moon's Special Representative for Afghanistan. He's talking about attacks on aid workers. Also here:

Insurgent and criminal gangs have killed 34 humanitarian workers so far this year. 76 aid workers have been abducted; 45 of our humanitarian facilities and 55 humanitarian convoys have been attacked and looted.

Affirming the truth about the Armenian genocide

On the question of Turkey's denials:

If the Turks wish to continue lying officially about what happened to the Armenians, then we cannot be expected to oblige them by doing the same (and should certainly resent and repudiate any threats against ourselves or our allies that would ensue from our Congress affirming the truth).

That's Hitch, and making an elementary point.

Breadth in learning

Further to this post, there's a good piece in today's Education Guardian by Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale. It affirms the importance, for education within the humanities, of something broader than a research specialism. He repeatedly expresses his point in terms of educating people in the 'meaning of life' - which may be regarded by some as an aim both hackneyed and over-ambitious. But Kronman's central point, about encouraging breadth of learning and understanding, introducing students to the literary wealth of humankind, is well made. He writes of...

... teachers too preoccupied with their research to see students as anything more than prospective members of their own specialties, rather than as human beings struggling for fulfilment and love, under the long shadow of death.

The article is here.